


blood runs cold

by onceuponamirror, stillscape



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Olympics, F/M, Ice Dancing, Olympics, Snowboarding, and definitely a lot of inspiration from Adam Rippon, and probably a lot of bad puns about winter, figure skating, oh my!, rating may change!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-03-22 02:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13754118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onceuponamirror/pseuds/onceuponamirror, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: It’s been nearly a decade since Jughead Jones moved away from his tiny town in upstate new york, but he never planned on going back, and definitely not like this. Betty Cooper’s figure skating dreams were supposed to take heroutof it. Apparently, fate has a sense of humor.Olympics AU.





	1. a snowball's chance in hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one: there is a wee bit of violence at the end, but nothing beyond the show's level.
> 
> two: we, two humble authors, know about the olympics as much as fp jones knows about snakes. however---we have access to google. so we're going to do our best on the technical details.
> 
> three: onceuponamirror is jughead, stillscape is betty.

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

It’s been nearly a decade, but he’s finally going home.

If only in terms of birth certificates, censuses, and technicalities; Jughead Jones hasn’t called that tiny town in New York State home since he was fourteen years old, knock-kneed, and, convinced it was himself against the world, still scowling at every other person who looked his way.

Well.

Maybe some things haven’t changed.

“Man, you gotta stop fidgeting,” Toni says next to him, casting his jiggling knee an increasingly offended look. “We have five more hours on this airplane and I’m going to amputate that leg if it keeps bouncing my tray. Be like Fogarty and go to sleep.”

“Fogarty won’t go to sleep if people next to him keep talking,” Fangs murmurs, just loud enough to be heard, scrunching up his jacket in lieu of a pillow. “Fogarty would sleep better if not only McCoy got first class.”

She rolls her eyes so far back they threaten to stick there, clearly unwilling to have that conversation again. Their on-camera talent, a former one-hit-wonder moonlighting as a new talking head for their digital streaming content, had demanded a first class ticket as part of her negotiations. Personally, Jughead thinks she’s a bit of a diva, but she does bring her own fanbase to the table, which basically means she gets whatever she wants.

Not desiring to say anything else that could set off the person who is technically his boss for the next two weeks, Jughead glares up the ceiling and presses his lips together.

Toni sighs and lowers her voice. “Look, Jughead, I’ve read your spec work and a couple of your articles from your college paper. I know you’re into crime and murder and all those vibes, so I get this isn’t exactly the assignment you wanted.”

“No kidding,” he accidentally mutters aloud, thinking distinctly that it might be unethical to actively wish to stumble into a cold case. A dick move, at least. He can feel Toni’s eyes on him, and when he finally looks over, her look isn’t wholly unsympathetic.

“Listen, if it was my hometown and I obviously didn’t have great memories of it, I wouldn’t want to go back either,” she says, eyebrows raised. “But like it or not, you being randomly from the small town where the Olympics are being hosted is a great catch for us. And it’s a big opportunity for you. So do a good job on your coverage, and _do what I say_ , and you’ll get more creative freedom next time.”

He nods and grunts in agreement, because what else is there to do? He’s barely two years out of college, this is his first real job (a completely rigorous and completely unpaid internship beforehand), and Toni is right; this is an opportunity. Maybe he’ll spare her another reminder that he’s going to be fairly useless to her, given only lived in Riverdale until his parents decided the town gang atmosphere was toxic and they had to get out before it suffocated their family.

Which—had worked, if only to a relative degree.

“So we’re on the same page, Jones?” Toni asks, before putting on her big, noise-cancelling headphones one more time. “Because I have some emails to reply to. I paid for an expensive in-flight wifi, and I plan to use it.”

“We’re good,” he says, and leans his head back against the seat rest, and attempts to clear his mind for sleep.

Five minutes later, however, his knee starts bouncing again.

Toni rips her headphones down around her shoulders, glowering at him.

He wonders if it’s worth saying, worth pointing out _again_ , and then—

“It’s just,” Jughead sighs, and then leans forward to rifle through his messenger bag, stuffed under the seat, and pulls it onto his lap. “Okay, I get what you were saying. But the Olympic Village was literally built over the old trailer park in town. The entire south side of the town was demolished to make way for the event. And I was looking into the land deal, and it’s really fishy, and—”

“Dude,” Toni growls, batting away the hand that offers her his printouts. “ _I’m_ under just as much pressure from my editor to keep everything shiny. You know what HuffPo wants in our coverage? They’re on my ass about some Barbie Ice Princess and the heir to the Flying Tomato throne. You think I give a fuck about Twitter’s obsession with some couple? No. But we don’t work for the _New York Times_ , Jones.”

Jughead’s entire mood sours at once and he bites down on his lip to keep his mouth shut. Not just because he’s aware he’s the kind of wannabe-intellectual who would sell his kidney to work at the _Times_ , let alone be given an opportunity to afford to live in New York City, he’s well aware of the trending topic Toni is referring to.

Because, for a person who generally considers himself above such vapid, clickbait content, he has actually spent an embarrassing amount of time following this supposed love story between his one-time best friends.

He doesn’t even understand why it’s this popular; it’s so trite. So unoriginal. Girl meets Boy and they both love snow. Wow. _Move over, Doctor Zhivago_ , he thinks bitterly.

Toni holds up a single finger. “And if you try to talk to _me_ one more time about gentrification, I swear, I’ll fire you.” He slumps back in his seat, mouth snapped shut. “If you want to be helpful,” she adds, a bit warningly, “I’ll expense wifi for you, and you can help me sift through some of these leads and interview requests. I’ve got like fifty from the Blossoms’ team alone. I’ll bulk forward them to you, okay?”

“Fine,” he mutters, and pulls out his laptop. Toni passes him the company card, which he uses to order the in-flight wifi. She’s already forwarded him about ten emails, most of which are pretty much junk in terms of actual leads; one even promises to reveal the name of the first openly gay athlete competing in the Winter Olympics, as if Kevin Keller isn’t currently Twitter’s sweetheart. As he scans the page, the only one that stands out is one of the Blossom messages, which, as he scans it closely, seems to be from one half of the ice dancing duo themselves.

It’s from Jason Blossom himself, in fact.

He has a visceral flash of a memory of his shoulder slamming into a locker, and with it comes a bittersweet kind of feeling. There’s no way Jason would know who this email would reach, but Jughead holds onto the brief bit of pride over the exchange of the power balance all the same—of course, it’s not like he got into journalism out of a revenge fantasy for the theoretical time he’d get to interview a former bully, but he supposes there are perks.

Reading it closer, however, the thing looks like it was broadly and vaguely enough written to be something sent out to several publications, a sort of urgency in the desire to meet. Squinting, Jughead wonders if this is fake—since when would a professional and beloved athlete send his own interview request? Don’t they have managers who do that kind of thing? Especially the Blossoms, a family he’s always theorized would pay someone to wipe their own ass if they could get away with it.

But the address looks legit, especially compared against some of their official press junkets they’ve been sent. And if Jason wants to talk, as the part of the team in charge of the digitally-printed word, Jughead’s probably the person who it would be with. So he shoots off a response, deliberately not signing his name, and agreeing to meet at his earliest convenience.

As soon as the plane lands, however, they’ll have to hit the ground running. This plane is only taking them as far as Albany, and from there is the rental car, and from there is another couple hours stuffed inside of it as they drive so far north the games are practically being hosted in Canada.

It might’ve honestly been faster to fly into Montreal, but Jughead doesn’t have much say in any of this, so he doesn’t know why his opinion would matter around travel plans. Jughead’s attention returns back to his emails, and then he sees the one that makes his stomach want to drop right out of his body.

His head hits against the back of his seat with more force this time, and he stares up at the little icons overhead, from the no-smoking to the little figure that lights up when asking for assistance. Dread sits comfortably in his stomach now; it’s been there so long that it’s become something of an expected feeling, a mantra between self-loathings.

_I want coffee, and my stomach is about to explode. I wish I didn’t quit smoking, and my gut is churning. Fish swim, birds fly, and I’d like to cringe myself out of existence._

He’s not sure what makes him more nervous—the act of going back to his hometown in general, or the people he’ll have to face there. Person.

Because there in his inbox sits a press inquest from Betty Cooper’s manager, yet another name he recognizes, yet another person who surely must not have known who her email would reach, because the last time he spoke to Alice Cooper, she was disdainfully eying his proximity to her fine china.

He’s been glaring up at the plane’s ceiling for too long now, because Toni has gained interest, peeking over his shoulder. “Is that from who I think it is?”

“I’m not doing this one,” he declares at once, wishing he’d deleted it instead of sulking inwardly for a few minutes. He knows it would be unprofessional, but he’d like to sooner shoot himself in the foot at the moment.

Toni eyes him skeptically. “Uh, yes, you are. That’s from Betty Cooper’s management, isn’t it? We’re _supposed_ to interview her—and Andrews, preferably together.”

Jughead feels like he’s just swallowed his own tongue. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I can’t do,” he says, and then, before he can think better of it, blurts out, “I used to know them. It’s too weird.”

She gapes for a moment, and then grabs for his laptop. There’s a brief struggle for it until he remembers once more that Toni is technically his boss now, and there’s only so far he can push this boundary. Her fingers clack away with the response he couldn’t give, an affirmation that HuffPo would absolutely _love_ to talk with Betty, as soon as it’s convenient, perhaps after the Opening Ceremonies?

And then she passes him back the computer, gentle as can be, her smug smile nearly a sneer. “You’re one lucky idiot, Jones,” she tells him, shaking her head. “And I’m going to forgive you nearly keeping this from me, because you’re going to tell me everything you know about Betty Cooper and Archie Andrews.”

 

❄ ❄ ❄

And, realizing the future of his career somehow depends on it, Jughead does.

He tells the tale like a long drag of the cigarette he desperately wishes he could have right now, and starts at the beginning.

He and Archie began as friends in utero, two aligned pregnancies from the skeptically bonded wives of a pair of best friends. As an adult, Jughead still suspects Mary Andrews had never much cared for Gladys, or certainly judged the fact that FP Jones had knocked up a girl two semesters shy of her high school graduation, but she at least never held Jughead himself at fault for it, and he was always welcome at the Andrews’.

It was a refuge he sought out naturally, given the thin walls of his own home, but increasingly so when they moved into the little yellow house on Elm Street, suspiciously around the time that Betty Cooper entered their lives, her dresses quite pink, her hair curled around pigtails.

Despite initially behaving as though she was an invading alien life form, he’d known who she was beforehand; Riverdale had always been a small town, and there were only so many five year olds in his class.

Betty was always a firsts kind of girl—first to reach for the craft supplies, and first to share them. First to raise her hand, first to turn in a test, and the first (and only) to join him at the library for hours of reading quietly together behind the stacks. First to help him up off the ground when Jason Blossom made the day’s mission to acquaint Jughead with it.

First girl that ever made his heart burn aflame.

He definitely doesn’t tell Toni that.

And for the sake of Betty’s privacy, as the story ages up, he also definitely doesn’t tell her about the crush she’d had on Archie, even if it’s the one thing Toni would like to hear.

Instead, he travels back in time to another first; the first trip into the Adirondacks he was invited to attend with the Andrewses. At that point, it was slowly becoming apparent that an eight year old Archie wasn’t _just_ good at snowboarding, but actually something else altogether. It was also becoming apparent that, by the fifth time the seat of Jughead’s borrowed ski pants hit the powder, _his_ something-else-altogether was a lack thereof.

The trend continued with Betty, skating along the outline of her sister, her time at the rink seeming to last a minute longer every session. He remembers Polly Cooper’s long, flowing hair swirling around the ice as Betty skated backwards in the center, dragging Jughead by the hands, his knees shaking for more than one reason.

The day he’d accidentally pulled her down with him was the last day he’d gone onto the ice with her. She hadn’t understood why he wouldn’t keep trying, insisting if he kept getting back up he would get the hang of it, and hadn’t talked to him for a week.

But they were nearly thirteen then, and he felt like he was getting too old to hold her hands without thinking of other things, and it’d been the right excuse at the right time. It was a cowardly move, but Jughead has never thought of himself as brave.

Because that candle in his chest, the cherry warmth he saw in her cheeks reflected into his heart, wasn’t only refusing to go away, it seemed to be growing stronger.

And then the flame abruptly turned on him; it became a second degree burn on the day he looked around and realized Betty Cooper cared about three things: figure skating, her sister, and what Archie Andrews would think of her new skating dress.

He’s sure he factored in somewhere there, but he’s never been much of his own cheerleader, and every day that Jughead realized he always going to be the odd one out in nearly every category was a day he felt further away from them, and a day Archie and Betty seemed closer and closer.

Aloud, he falters here in the story, unsure how to get through this part of the story while maintaining the privacy of two people he still respects—but manages it by explaining Betty and Archie have truly always been as American as apple pie, actually grew up next door from one another, and admits if they don’t end up married with two-point-five kids, he’ll eat his hat.

He pauses, time catching up to him.

Because then he was fourteen and his parents were screaming and his mother was giving an ultimatum: Ohio together, or apart. His mother couldn’t stand Riverdale, or couldn’t stand the trailer park, or couldn’t stand to see his father’s world claw her family apart. Somehow, by a strange twist of fate, FP Jones had agreed to leave town with her, Jughead alongside.

He hadn’t known how to tell Archie, and he definitely hadn’t known how to tell Betty.

In the end, he never did.

FP told Fred, who told Archie, who told Betty, who was furious with Jughead for keeping it from her. At least, he thinks she was furious—she cried and berated him over the phone profusely, but by the time she’d showed up at the trailer, her eyes were dry and firm and she was pressing a piece of pink diary paper scribed with her email address into his palm.

Archie and Fred helped the Joneses pack up, the two of them atypically silent. Archie kicked a pebble around outside the trailer while the last box went into the U-Haul and held a long face as he scraped around the words for an emotional goodbye.

Tears had stung at Jughead’s eyes too, but snow had started falling, which meant it was time to get on the road if they were going to beat it.

Betty had showed up just then, still in her little blue skating dress, paired with her sneakers, glitter streaked across her face, panting like she’d run there. She’d had a meet that day and he’d steeled himself for the fact that she wouldn’t have time to say goodbye.

But she’d made it, thrown her arms around his neck, and sent him an email telling him all about the axel she’d landed before they even hit state lines.

The emails kept coming over the years, but around sixteen, they started featuring a lot more of _we dids_ between her and Archie and the flame in his chest began to burn painfully again; perhaps it was the inevitability of it all that hurt the most. Eventually, he stopped replying, and eventually she stopped trying.

And now, on an airplane that will carry him to a reunion, he exhales.

Toni scribbles down the broad strokes he offered onto a notepad. For as much as his thoughts went back in time, he didn’t actually tell her anything that she couldn’t have found via a very deep Google search, but she seems pleased with him for the first time since he’s gotten this assignment.

Jughead sighs again, and then glares out the window across the aisle from him until the woman in his line of sight starts looking uncomfortable. He wishes he hadn’t opened that email. Wishes he hadn’t said anything.

He was _fourteen_ the last time he saw her, and there are many pretty blonde girls in the world, quite especially in his own proximity, given he lives in sunny Los Angeles now.

And yet—in this last decade, he’s never been quite able to replicate that feeling with anyone else. The flickering torch in his chest, the fidgeting in his feet that travelled all the way up to his head; to date, no one has made him feel like Betty Cooper could.

He supposes there are people who might think it’s romantic that shining Betty Cooper, with her little sweaters thrown over her skating dresses and her bouncy, slicked back ponytail, has remained a singular comparison for all other girls he’s tried to get himself to like. Though there are others—like the therapist he can’t really afford, probably—who might think it’s concerning.

Or perhaps that’s projection, because he’s most concerned about what’s going to happen when he sees her or Archie again. Best-case scenario, he gets closure and can put the past where it belongs. But being who he is, he’s much more preoccupied with the worst-case scenario: what if it all comes rushing back and it’s harder to let go of than ever?

And maybe he could’ve before, if the story of Betty Cooper and her supposed love interest Archie Andrews, would stop edging into his peripheral twittersphere. If it wasn’t now his job to ask them about the one thing he’s always dreaded: their relationship.

If it wasn’t all so annoyingly predictable.

It’s been nearly a decade, he’s finally going home, and it’s to write about the world’s longest carried torch.

The irony doesn’t escape him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

The very ground she stands on is thrumming with anticipation. She can feel the crowd more than she can hear it, a low-pitched rumble that travels even through her thick, rubber-soled snow boots. Forty thousand spectators are on the edges of their seats, collective breaths held in anticipation of the last country, the _host_ country, in the Parade of Nations. They’ve been waiting all night for this.

Betty Cooper has been waiting her entire life.

Overhead, loudspeakers crinkle to life. Somewhere in the Winter Maple Coliseum, an announcer must be saying the magic words: _The United States of America_ , first in English and then in French. But from where she bounces on her toes deep in the tunnel, she cannot hear those words over the rush of wind and the sudden roar of the crowd.

She takes a deep breath. Beside her, Archie Andrews—her oldest friend, her one-time sort-of boyfriend, and now her teammate—grabs her gloved hand in his.

“You ready?” he asks, and Betty, nodding, spreads on her biggest smile.

They’re supposed to stick to the edges of the U.S. delegation so that the cameras can find them more easily. Despite weeks of gently deflecting rumors, neither the media nor the fans have fully accepted that she and Archie are just good friends, that they haven’t been together since high school. But as nearly two hundred and fifty athletes in red, white, and blue spill into the arena, as she and Archie round the final corner and find themselves dazzled by bursts of light, she realizes she couldn’t care less about her new designation as America’s, or as Archie’s, sweetheart. For the minutes it takes the United States procession to wave its way around the stadium, she’s simply happy to be here. Everyone starts taking selfies.

Only when she’s in the designated Team USA holding area, preparing to upload a slightly blurry picture of her, Kevin, and Veronica to Twitter, and sees herself tagged in a post by @tripletoecoop—

_So proud of my baby sis marching in the Opening Ceremonies tonight! Knock ‘em dead @bcoopsonice! #riverdale2018 #olympics_

—does she remember that the next two weeks were supposed to belong to Polly.

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

 She was three years old the first time she followed her sister onto the ice. Polly was five, and already twirling circles around much older girls. Their mother has always liked telling reporters that Betty fought for months before they allowed her to wobble around the edges of the rink during Polly’s early-morning practices; that they hadn’t even intended to bring Betty along, “but you try getting a babysitter to show up at 4:45 every morning,” and, well, look what happened. Not just one international-caliber skater in the family, but two.

Betty’s own, dim recollection is that she wanted to curl up in the bleachers with her stuffed cat, or maybe with a picture book, but she supposes Alice’s memories of eighteen years ago must be clearer than hers.

Two years after Polly started competing, Betty started as well—in Polly’s outgrown costumes, to Polly’s outgrown routines.

An old video resurfaced on YouTube not long before the Olympic selection trials and has been making the rounds ever since. It shows Polly at fifteen and her at thirteen, interviewed together before a big competition. “Is there ever any sibling rivalry between you two?” asks an unseen correspondent, and both girls shake their heads, sending loose blonde strands of hair flying every which way.

“Never,” says Polly, fierce with conviction. “Betty’s my biggest fan, and I’m hers.”

“Never,” Betty echoes, equally fierce. “I just make sure I work really hard so that maybe, one day, I’ll be as good as Polly.”

Deep in her heart, she knows she’s still not as good as Polly.

Or, rather, she’s not as good as Polly would be, had Polly not blown out her knee.

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“What in the name of several Abominable Snowmen,” Veronica Lodge mutters in Betty’s ear. She gestures at the center of the arena, where two groups of dancers in abstract costumes are circling a third group of dancers dressed as trees. “Please tell me there’s a valid explanation for this pantomime?”

Archie jumps in before she can answer. “It’s General Pickens leading the first great maple tapping,” he says. “I think.”

“It’s not the first great maple tapping, Archie,” Betty corrects; Archie never was very good in history class. “It’s the two waves of European settlement, see? The ones coming from that direction are the ones who came through Quebec, and the ones coming from _that_ side—” She points at the other end of the stadium. “They’re following General Pickens and Barnabas Blossom up from Massachusetts, see?”

“Barnabas Blossom,” Veronica says. “ _Blossom_? Like…”

Everyone’s eyes travel to the edge of their little cluster of skaters, where not even the mandated chunky cable-knit hats can block out the brilliant red hair of the United States’ premier brother-sister ice dancing team.

“Yup,” Betty confirms. “Those Blossoms.”

Veronica purses her lips just a bit, and Betty understands exactly why. Everyone on the figure skating team has known each other for years; they’ve been to the same competitions, watched each other skate thousands of times, hung out in hotel rooms and airports all over the world. Though they’ve never lived within three hundred miles of each other and don’t typically see each other more than once or twice a month, she’s closer to Veronica than she is to anyone in the world other than Archie and her sister.

The Blossoms, though…

The Blossoms have always set themselves a little bit apart. Sure, Betty’s spent hours upon hours around them, and knows their current short dance almost as well as she knows her own short program. But she’s never felt close to Cheryl like she’s felt close to Veronica—even though she grew up less than five miles from the Blossoms’ massive familial estate and has been training at the Blossom Skating Center since she was three.

A shadow falls over Betty’s shoulder, and she looks up to see Veronica’s partner in pairs skating looming over her.

“Shit,” says Sweet Pea. “What’s in the water up here, anyway?”

Archie—the lone snowboarder in their gang of figure skaters—draws himself up the slightest bit taller, so that the pompom on the top of his hat makes it to just about the tip of Sweet Pea’s nose. “Maple syrup,” he says eagerly. “It’s the maple syrup.”

“Spoken like a boy who’s allowed to eat carbohydrates,” Veronica sighs.

“Why did the river turn into a giant snake?” asks Sweet Pea next. Betty finds she has no answer.

Her parents will have set the DVR at home, she knows. She’ll watch the Opening Ceremonies at home, with commentary—and though part of her would rather just stay in the Olympic Village for the length of the Games, with home less than half an hour away, she won’t have much of an excuse not to sleep in her own bed at least a couple of nights.

She hopes that, while they were marching, she smiled enough to keep her mother (her mother-slash-manager) happy. Then she fixes her eyes on the tall cauldron—the Soda Fountain Glass, it’s already been dubbed, thanks to its shape and material—and joins the rest of the crowd in waiting for the torch to enter the stadium, for the flame to be lit.

 

 

 

 

 ❄ ❄ ❄

Most of the U.S. athletes head back to their quarters after the Opening Ceremonies are over, but Betty has an interview to do. It’s the first sit-down in what will either be a big profile or a series of short pieces for the _Huffington Post_ —she’s honestly not sure which—and so she begins walking to the agreed-upon location, one of the little press rooms inside Sweetwater Skating Rink.

“Wait up, Blondie,” says a voice behind her, and so she does.

“I think it’s safe to walk alone here by myself at night, Kevin,” she tells her figure skating teammate as he jogs in beside her. “Trust me, nothing remotely interesting has _ever_ happened in Riverdale, with or without Olympic-level security details patrolling everywhere.”

“I know. I’m headed your way, though. I may not be America’s newest sweetheart—although by all rights I _should_ be; have you seen how good my ass looks in my new short program costume? But. Let’s just say sweetheart possibilities exist on a much smaller scale.”

“Oh?”

“Betty, darling…” Kevin throws an arm around her shoulder. “There’s a possibility I may need to requisition some of your forty-three allotted free condoms.”

“Oh, my god. Do I even want to know?”

“Mm. Well, he’s a skater of a slightly different ilk, and while his name may be Moose, I would describe a certain appendage of his as… horse-like.”

“Okay. Yeah. I don’t want to know,” Betty says, holding up a hand as she racks her brain for which of their fellow countrymen is named _Moose_. Finally, it comes to her. “You’re hooking up with the hockey team’s goalie?”

“He propositioned me in the bathroom just now.”

“With his _appendage_?”

They—or really, Kevin—spend the rest of the walk over discussing which other athletes are out, and which might be closeted. While hooking up in the Village is an Olympic tradition, it’s not one she’d particularly planned on experiencing for herself. Though she knows Kevin’s a romantic at heart, he’s still capable of having sex without much fallout, of separating the physical from the emotional, which she never has been. Archie never sleeps with anyone he doesn’t love, but then, Archie falls in and out of love faster than he can perform a frontside 1080. Betty’s own internal flame has always been a little slower to ignite.

Besides, she has so many more important things than sex to focus on. Such as not letting anyone down at her first and only Olympics.

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Once inside Sweetwater Skating Rink, she ducks into a restroom to freshen her minimalist makeup and ensure that her hat hair isn’t too awful; while photos aren’t on tonight’s agenda, so far as she knows, she also knows it never hurts to be a little bit camera-ready.

She tucks her Team USA hat inside an inside pocket of her parka, nods at her reflection, and heads to the press room, where she pushes open the door to discover that the journalist is already there. He’s sitting at a small round table and slouched over a laptop, but looks up when he hears her open the door.

Her first thought is that the journalist hasn’t taken off _his_ hat; her second is that she _knows_ that hat. The last time she saw it was eight years ago, and she finds herself suddenly and viscerally transported back to that time: standing at the edge of Sunnyside Trailer Park with Archie at her side, both of them crying and waving at the cab of an ancient pickup as it took their third musketeer away from Riverdale for good…

“Jughead?” Her voice sounds incredulous, even to her own ears. “Jughead Jones?”

He stands up and takes a hesitant step sideways—away from the table; towards her. “Hey, Betty,” he says quietly, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Surprise, I guess?”

Betty barely has time to gasp out a quick, “Oh, my god,” before she’s across the room and hugging him. As she expected (or would have expected, if she’d given herself time to think about it), Jughead hesitates for a second or two before reciprocating.

Through her shock at seeing him, her brain manages to file away a few details. He’s gotten tall, for one, but not _too_ tall. He smells nice, for another, although she can’t identify any particular scent other than fresh coffee. His hair, or what she can see of it from under the hat, remains unruly. When they each take a step back and she holds him at arm’s length, she lets her eyes travel down his torso until she gets to the official press credentials hanging on the end of a lanyard around his neck. These she picks up and examines.

“Or should I call you Forsythe now?” she asks, noting what’s printed on his plastic ID badge.

Jughead clears his throat the tiniest bit. “Please don’t.”

“So some things haven’t changed,” she says, nodding her chin at the familiar old hat. “It’s good to see you again, Jughead. God, wait until I tell Archie. Or does he already know you’re here? Should I text him? I know he’ll want to see you. He’d come running over right now, I bet.”

“He doesn’t know, but it can wait. I’m supposed to try to get the two of you into an interview together at some point anyway.” Jughead sits down, crossing one ankle over the other knee, and gestures for her to sit down as well. Once she has, he taps a key on his laptop. “Should we get started?”

Betty nods, more in an attempt to get her emotions under control than in agreement. The prospect of talking about herself, never a very interesting one, has suddenly become a lot less so. Besides, if Jughead’s done even the slightest bit of research on her, if he’s read even a tenth of what’s been published in the weeks since she unexpectedly won the U.S. Championships, he’ll already know everything he needs to know about the last eight years of her life.

She wonders, suddenly, if he’s at all happy to see her.

“Wait, no,” she says. “Just—you’re supposed to interview me and Archie together?”

“Them’s the orders,” Jughead replies. “Next door neighbors and childhood sweethearts, both competing in the Olympics in their own hometown? It’s the biggest human interest story of the Games. Other than the shirtless Tongan flagbearer from the Rio games taking up cross-country skiing, of course. But so far nobody’s asked me to interview _him_.”

Something inside Betty, some tiny thing inside her that she’s never previously noticed, abruptly snaps.

“We’re not together, you know.”

Jughead glances up from the laptop and catches her eye, and she thinks she sees something deeper than mere journalistic curiosity in the way he looks at her.

“I’m not really supposed to say that,” she adds. “No one on either of our teams wants us to deny it outright, so this is off the record, okay? And I suppose the childhood sweethearts part is technically kind of true. But…we’re not dating now. We barely ever did.”

He continues to look skeptical. Many things have undoubtedly changed in the past ten years, but Jughead’s skepticism, she sees, is not one of them. His face is thinner now than it was at thirteen or fourteen, his hands less fidgety. But if there had been any doubts lingering in Betty’s mind that the man in front of her now is the same boy whose departure she cried over for weeks, they’re dispelled by his current expression.

“Anyway,” she says, letting herself sigh just a little bit, “on the record, Archie’s been my best friend since we were five and he bet me I couldn’t beat him in an ice-skating race, and that’s all I have to say about that.”

Jughead clacks a few computer keys. “Duly noted. Incidentally, Miss Off-The-Record, I’m going to start recording now. But first…” He trails off, the skeptical expression shading back into curious.

“First?”

“There is one thing I really want to know,” he says, settling back a little in his chair. “Is Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe still around?”

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Her description of the milkshakes and onion rings she hasn’t let herself taste in at least three years seems to help the ice thaw a little more, to the point that by the time they hear two sets of footsteps racing past their door, Jughead’s almost smiling and Betty’s almost forgotten how much she hates being interviewed.

“What was that?” she asks, at the noise. They both jump to their feet; she’s closer to the door, so she’s the one who steps into the hallway first and sees two figures in Team USA apparel racing down the hallway.

One of the figures, the smaller one, looks familiar.

“Kevin?” she calls.

He screeches to a halt and turns back to her; the larger figure, whom Betty now assumes to be Moose Mason, keeps going. “Betty! Oh, my god, oh, my god. We have to call someone. Who do we call?”

In all the years that she’s known Kevin, Betty has never once seen him panic.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s—it’s—oh, god. We have to call the cops. Or Olympic security. Or—”

Behind her, she senses Jughead reaching for his cell phone, but Kevin manages to pull his out first. He dials and puts speakerphone on, and the next thing Betty hears is a 911 operator asking for a description of the emergency.

“I’m in Sweetwater Skating Rink,” Kevin gasps. “At the Olympic Village. Send the police, quick. There’s been a murder.”

“A murder?” Betty looks at Kevin, then down at the hallway at Moose’s still-departing form, and finally at Jughead.

The two of them lock eyes for half a second, and then—as one—they take off down the corridor.

“Betty, don’t look,” Kevin yells after her. “Please, don’t.”

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

She was eight years old when she first discovered the Nancy Drew section at the Riverdale public library. Polly wasn’t interested in mysteries and Archie refused to read “girl books” (or, more accurately, anything with more chapters than pictures), but Jughead proved easy to convince, and the two of them spent the summer between second and third grades reading every age-appropriate mystery they could get their hands on. They weren’t quite old enough to have quit playing pretend yet, and so Archie had gotten roped into Nancy Drew after all. Having neither read the books nor mastered the art of detective work, he was inevitably relegated to the role of either villain or, more often, murder victim.

Those are the images that flash to the front of her mind as she and Jughead race towards the main rink: the two of them playing with magnifying glasses and pretending to dust for fingerprints as Archie lay prone and annoyed on the ground, pretending to be dead. Once he’d even emptied an entire bottle of ketchup over himself, after which Mary Andrews, unable to remove the stains from Archie’s white shirt, had gently put a stop to that particular iteration of the game.

“There,” Jughead breathes, grabbing her forearm with one hand and pointing with the other. She sees the activity, too: Moose Mason, arriving at the kiss and cry with a uniformed security guard.

They rush around to that side of the arena.

“Don’t,” Moose implores, picking up where Kevin left off.

It’s too late.

Since her childhood detective days, Betty’s read books with graphic descriptions of murders. She’s seen crime scene photos in black and white and in color. She’s watched crime documentaries and _Silence of the Lambs_ and once, while recovering from a mild ankle sprain, she’d marathoned every season of _Dexter_. But seeing a murder in person, with her own two eyes, is so much worse.

There’s so much blood. _So_ much blood. A pool of it, on the floor. The smell of it, that metallic tang, in her nose. A single ice skate (the murder weapon?) on its side, in the puddle, in front of the body.

And the body. The body, the _victim_ , is someone she knows.

“Oh, my god,” she chokes out. She can’t look, but she can’t turn away either. A hand lands on her shoulder; she registers it as belonging to Jughead, registers that Jughead is gently trying to pull her away. She takes a few steps back, until she’s so close to Jughead that she can feel his ragged breaths against her ear.

Still, though, she keeps looking.

Propped up on the bench, lifeless, with a single clean slice across his throat, is Jason Blossom.

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

(to be continued)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you liked the first installment. wanting to skewer and poke riverdale's dramatics a bit, we've cooked up a fun mystery (and it might not be what you think!) and some romance and sleuthing against the backdrop of the olympics, of all things. we're thirsty for your feedback, so please send some our way. we'd love a comment.
> 
> (sidebar: sweet pea...in tights)


	2. on thin ice

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄ 

_Be careful what you wish for._

He can’t remember where he read it first, or if it was just the kind of thing whispered into the ears of children with overactive imaginations, kids like himself, kids who would stay up too late because they could hear bumps in the night and knew they were a different kind of monster altogether.

(His father coming and going at all hours, the men with the hooded eyes who lingered at the doorways, men he knew his mother hated—)

And despite being a person with a fondness for government conspiracy theories, moon landing and all, Jughead Jones has always considered himself a skeptic. Prided himself on it, in fact.

Rather, it’s his sister who has always had the fascination with the occult, who still very seriously informs him every aspect of his behavior is due to his astrological signs. No—years of growing up assuring JB there was nothing under her bed, no ghosts in the attic, and no literal skeletons in the closet.

Just the metaphorical sort.

But on a night like this one, learning the pattern of blood splatter and understanding true horror for the first time in his life, Jughead wonders—truly wonders, if there is an actual curse following him around.

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ when he was thirteen and sandwiching his head between two pillows in an attempt to muffle the shouts, wishing his parents would just pick something, anything, to agree on. (Be careful what you wish for, and say goodbye to every friend you’ve ever had.)

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ when he was seventeen and knowing his only shot at college was financial aid, a pitying scholarship, but one he’d have to buck up for anyway. (Be careful what you wish for, and move across the country, to a place that is nothing but sunshine, to a place too far away from the sister that still needs you but the only school that’ll throw you the biggest bone)

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ when he was twenty-one and desperate for work in his chosen field, anything, no matter the level of intellectual brow. (Be careful what you wish for, and say hello to your new best friend, mindless, pointless clickbait and listicles.)

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ when he is twenty-three, when he steps foot in the one place he never expected to see again, when he is filled with nothing but dread and nerves and thoughts of blonde hair and still cripplingly bored in spite of all that, vaguely wishing something interesting would happen, even as banal the case of a missing Olympic medal.

It was more than that, too. Waiting to see the girl he’s never been able to forget, he distinctly had wished upon any star willing to listen that he’d probably give  _anything_ to not have to write about the supposedly long romance between her and someone else.

And now, that girl, who had smiled at him so softly not long ago, whose color has since drained from her cheeks, grabs at his arm; perhaps out of horror, maybe in support.

Jughead gapes at Jason Blossom’s lifeless body, slumped, his eyes vacant and open at the ceiling, almost as if staring at nothing but the shadow of his killer.

He knows he shouldn’t feel responsible—he obviously didn’t kill Jason Blossom, he didn’t wish for that to happen, god, he would never—but there’s a little voice at the corner of his thoughts, and it is laughing at him, and not in a kind way. 

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ he thinks. 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄ 

Within twenty minutes, the local police and the Olympic federation have closed off the rink, and despite the barrage of emergency vehicles and their bright red lights bouncing silently, ominously, off the snowy treetops outside—as far as he can tell, the rest of the Olympic community is out celebrating, partying, or resting up for their events, and blissfully unaware what has just happened to one half of their ceremonial champions.

Later, after he’s finally been released from the crime scene and suffered through a lengthy and uncomfortable reunion with the Riverdale sheriff that brings a round of familiarly suspicious questioning, Jughead returns to his hotel room and calls the team together in his suite. Or, more accurately, since it’s well past midnight: he bangs on each of their doors until they wake up, caring little for their slumbering neighbors.

Josie is furious to be woken, and answers her door in a silk, leopard-print robe and what seems to be an overnight skincare mask, and nearly refuses to leave her room, but he doesn’t take no for an answer. Fogarty and Toni at least are more receptive once they take in the look on his face, which he assumes must be as wan and shaken as he feels, and follow him back to his room.

Quietly, he tells them.

Josie’s mouth drops open and doesn’t close, Toni blinks and blinks again, and Fogarty runs pale as a sheet.

“Holy shit,” Toni hisses. She drops her head into her hands and pushes her pink hair back from her forehead. “Are you…sure?”

There’s a nasty quip on the tip of his tongue, thinking bitterly there was no way around the things he saw, but like Jason, it dies there. Instead, he exhales shakily and nods.

“Well, this is news to me,” Toni murmurs, eyes wide as she quickly checks her phone. “There hasn’t been any kind of press release sent out yet.”

“Oh my god. Seriously? This is insane,” Josie says quietly from the bed, and Fogarty just nods silently in agreement, as if lost for any other words.

Toni’s attention shifts back to Jughead, a strange expression on her face, as if reading his next train of thought, or maybe just seeing the way he’s started fidgeting. She throws up a hand in his direction. “Whoa, okay, hold your horses, Jones. I know you want to jump on this story, but we can’t just drive headfirst into this—I need to call the LA office first, they might want to send another journalist more familiar with crime—”

“Someone is _dead,_ Toni,” he says lowly, but firmly. “And you want us to just sleep on it? Literally? Christ, don’t you think people have the right to know? Don’t you think Jason deserves justice?”

“Of course I do,” she snaps back, one hand still pinching at her temple. Her eyes briefly close. “But, fuck, we were supposed to be writing literal powder puff pieces. I’m not saying we do nothing, but—just, wait. Until we have more information.”

He glowers at her, and even Fangs and Josie exchange glances, as if unsure who they agree with. Toni notices, and adds, still in a furiously lowered voice, “Reporting on this too early could get lose us our press passes, or for all we know, the reason the ICC hasn’t put out a release is because it’d impede the investigation. Use that big head of yours and, for once, _think_ first.”

“What about the rest of us?” Josie asks. “I mean, do we just go on with our camera interviews, business as usual? I’m supposed to cover the figure skating as if nothing has changed?”

Toni nods. “For now or until I tell you otherwise, yes. And Jughead, just promise me you won’t do anything off-schedule until we talk again?”

His lips twist, and something simmers at his skin, but he nods.

She gets to her feet, looking smaller than usual without her typical assemblage of clunky, heeled boots, her expression incredibly strained. “I know you don’t agree with me, but this is my call. We’re just going to lay low tonight, and we’ll figure the rest out tomorrow, okay? Let’s all try to get some sleep.”

Josie lets out a dry, humorless laugh, but joins Toni in standing up, and Fogarty follows in suit. Slowly, they all drain out of his hotel room, though Toni lingers last in the doorframe, doing her best to hold his gaze, uncomfortable as she seems.

“Look—Jones, I—” She seems to be unable to phrase her words, and then, as if realizing she doesn’t have them in the first place, says, “Are you going to be okay, with what you saw?”

He doesn’t answer her; wouldn’t know how to, even to himself. Jason Blossom flashes in his thoughts, dead, dead, dead.

Instead, he just closes the door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“You’re all going to continue on with the competition.”

Cheryl Blossom stands at the head of the table in the cafeteria, presiding over a breakfast meeting composed of a very tired United States figure skating team, a team whose whose members barely slept last night. Though she knows she shouldn't, Betty's allowing herself a little extra coffee this morning. Kevin, sitting to one side of her, is particularly ashen and subdued even after two large vanilla lattes. On her other side, a ruddy, chapped hand lands on her knee and squeezes lightly; she looks up and into Archie's familiar, concerned, furrowed brow, and makes herself take a breath.

(The meeting is really the United States figure skating team plus one United States snowboarder—Archie is here representing Riverdale, if not the correct sport. Betty finds she’s so grateful to have him by her side that for once she doesn’t even mind the sad contrast between his delicious-smelling pancakes, hash browns, and bacon and her single slice of dry whole-grain toast and egg whites scrambled with spinach, the same exact breakfast she’s eaten every single morning for the last five years at least.)

“I think everyone will understand if the U.S. withdraws from tonight,” Veronica says gently.

The rest of the team nods in agreement, but Cheryl stands firm, even purses her lips a little. Inside her red Ralph Lauren turtleneck, her shoulders square.

“No. Midge and Joaquin will take the place of Jason and myself in the team competition. The rest of you will attack the ice as planned. Even without our superior contributions, the U.S. has a good chance of winning a medal. I expect you all to do your best.”

Such a thing seems physiologically impossible, but as Cheryl spreads her fingertips on the table and leans forward, looking around at all of them, Betty realizes her skin is even paler than usual.

“That’s what Jay-Jay would have wanted,” she concludes. Although Betty has no idea what Jason would have wanted, and although Cheryl has no official power over United States figure skating, it feels decided: they’ll continue on. For Jason. And for themselves.

Archie turns to her as they’re loading their empty trays onto the conveyor belt. “You will give Jughead my number, right?” he says, rather hopefully. “I wish I could come to morning practice with you, but—”

“You have your qualifying runs tomorrow, Archie. You need to practice.”

“I’ll be there tonight, though. Promise.”

“You’re the best,” she tells him, and she means it. Due to their increasingly convoluted schedules, neither of them has been able to see the other compete much in the last couple of years. And no one, not even Polly, has ever been better at moral support.

(Polly simply has too much knowledge of the sport, not to mention too much of Alice Cooper’s DNA, for tiny drops of criticism not to leak through.)

“And I’ll make sure Jughead has your number, if he doesn’t already.”

“Wait, do you have his now?”

She does, in fact; they’d exchanged numbers hastily between multiple sessions explaining to the police that no, they hadn’t seen anything unusual or suspicious. Jughead Jones is right there in her phone, one brief text chain (him: _Did you get back safely?_ ; her: _Yes, did you?_ ; him: _yeah. Good night, Betty_ ; her: _Good night, Jug_ ) already buried under messages from the dozens of people who’d started contacting her right after news of Jason’s death broke early this morning.

Archie talks her into taking a picture of the two of them to send to Jughead, and then adds his number to the text before she sends it. He gives her a quick hug goodbye before jogging off to catch the shuttle to the snowboarding complex; Betty waits for a moment, watching him disappear down the hall.

He remains the only snowboarder she has ever met who’s kept his hair short and tidy for his entire life. The bulky Team USA ski jacket disguises exactly how broad his shoulders are. Those attributes put together mean that from behind, it’s impossible not to notice just how much he resembles Jason Blossom.

All at once, the horrible image rises in her mind— _Archie_ in the kiss and cry last night, _Archie_ lifeless in a pool of his own blood—and she very nearly retches.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“We’re all still in a lot of shock, of course,” Betty tells a reporter.

She’s honestly not sure who this particular person squinting at her through black-rimmed spectacles is ("Dilton Doiley," according to the badge on his coat) or what outlet he’s with. But there’s a microphone in front of her and a camera just beyond that, so all that matters right now is functioning on autopilot until she can get from the edge of the athlete's complex to the van that will drive her ten miles across town to her home rink, where morning practices have been moved owing to the fact that the competition rink is currently an active crime scene.

Not that she expects things to be less chaotic at the Blossom Skating Center. Right now, she can only hope for a more familiar, more manageable kind of chaos.

But then, she really has no precedent for one of her teammates being murdered on the eve of competition. Or for that competition being the _Olympics_.

“Do you think this will affect your performance in the short program for the team competition tonight?”

Her mother’s voice echoes in the back of her mind. _Don’t answer that directly, Elizabeth_.

“I don’t know,” she says, and then curses inwardly at her slip-up. “But there’s a certain mentality all athletes have—once you get out there, once your skates hit the ice, you do the job you’ve been trained to do.”

“This is probably the largest distraction you’ve ever had to block out, though.” The microphone is shoved just a little closer to Betty’s face. “Wouldn’t you say?”

Despite her commitment to neutral autopilot mode, Betty finds herself bristling. “Jason’s death isn’t a distraction. It’s a tragedy. And it’s not one I want to block out; that would be disrespectful to his memory. So I’m going to go out there tonight and skate my best for the team.”

Dilton Doiley appears to have at least one follow-up question, but Betty thanks him loudly and firmly, executes a half-pirouette on the salted sidewalk, and heads towards the van. Once she’s inside and has buckled herself into the middle row of seats, Veronica reaches over from the back and squeezes her hand.

“It’s like running a gauntlet out there,” she says, empathy and annoyance equally reflected in her dark, tired eyes. Sweet Pea’s enormous hand lands on Veronica’s upper back, engulfing it almost entirely, and Betty feels a corresponding but unmassaged ache in her own shoulders.

Then she hears her own voice echoing from the front seat, and realizes someone is streaming live coverage on a phone.

“You handled that overgrown Boy Scout reasonably well,” says Cheryl, not bothering to look back, “but next time, try not to look like you’re about to burst into tears.”

From behind her, Sweet Pea scoffs. “We’re skaters, Cheryl. We cry.”

Cheryl does look back then, but she’s wearing a pair of sunglasses so large that Betty can’t read any part of her expression.

It strikes her that this is precisely the point.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“Ugh, more reporters?” Veronica groans when they arrive at the rink. “I thought this was supposed to be our private space.”

“I don’t think the press can be kept away from morning practice,” Betty points out.

“I suppose not. Can we at least agree not to talk to them until after?”

For a split second, Betty’s about to say she’d like nothing more than that. But then she spots Jughead standing off to the side with a truly enormous coffee, what must be the rest of his team, and her mother and sister, and realizes her day with the media is only just beginning.

The prospect honestly doesn’t seem so terrible.

Alice Cooper’s lips are thin and tight as Betty approaches. “You didn’t tell me your little friend was the one writing this profile of you, dear,” she says, not deigning to even flick her eyes at Jughead.

“Jughead?” She has to fight back a bit of a chuckle at the description of Jughead as her _little friend_ , like he’s still a skinny twelve-year-old accidentally tracking mud into the otherwise spotless Cooper kitchen. “I didn’t know until last night, Mom, and then things got kind of overwhelming.”

Alice’s demeanor softens a bit as she sweeps Betty into a hug. The affection would be surprising, except that Jughead’s entire team is very obviously watching them from about two yards away.

“I’m just glad you’re safe.” Her mother stands up and takes a step back, holding Betty at arm’s length. “Now go practice. Polly, coach your sister.”

Betty nods. She turns to Polly, and realizes for the first time that her sister looks almost as pale as Cheryl Blossom had.

“I’m okay to warm up on my own,” Betty says.

Polly shakes her head. “No, I’ll come with you. I could, you know…” _Use a break from Mom_ remains unspoken.

“Betty, hi. Toni Topaz,” says one of Jughead’s team members, a petite woman with pink hair who seems to be in charge of the whole operation. She steps forward, right hand extended.

“Nice to meet you, Toni,” Betty says, shaking hands first with her and then with the cameraman, who claims to be named Fangs. It is, she supposes, no odder a nickname than _Jughead_.

Toni plants a fist on one hip, tilting her head; despite being covered from head to toe in fashionable ski apparel, Betty feels strangely naked. “Jug, you good to cover Betty’s morning routine?”

Jughead nods, more at his coffee than at Toni. “I’m good.”

“Good,” Toni echoes. “So, Alice, you’ll come with us for now, and we’ll get what we need. Betty, we’ll get you on camera after lunch, and then Mr. Andrews—shoot. Has his team responded to the request yet?”

Alice does not look impressed, and neither does the other woman in the crew, whom Betty recognizes vaguely from somewhere, and assumes must be the on-camera talent. This last person she does not meet quite yet; the woman is a few feet off to the side, talking on her phone.

“Archie’s training this morning, but he should be back this afternoon,” Betty volunteers—not that she’s part of Archie’s media team, but, well. She does know his schedule.

“Not much time to edit,” Fangs mutters, but Toni merely shrugs.

“We’ll get it done,” she says, and then strides over to grab the talent.

Polly shoots more than one nervous glance at Jughead as he follows them through the morning practice, but as far as Betty can tell, she doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary.

The practice, to Betty’s immense relief (and, honestly, to her surprise), goes well. An urge strikes her as she’s wrapping up, and when she spots a lull in the general activity, she zips across the ice and launches into the hardest jump for any female skater: a triple axel.

The landing is extremely wobbly. But she does land it.

“Whoo!” Veronica yells from across the ice. How she’s able to pay such close attention to what Betty is doing while Sweet Pea holds her overhead in a carry lift is beyond comprehension, but apparently not beyond Veronica. “You go, girl.”

“What were you thinking, trying that triple axel?” Polly hisses, as Betty steps off the ice feeling freer than she has in months. “What if you hadn’t landed it? What if you’d hurt yourself?”

The entire weight of the world, or maybe just the entire weight of the Cooper family, falls back on Betty’s shoulders.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she says, blankly. “I was just… skating.”

“You can’t _just skate_. Not here. Not now. And not in front of the press!”

“What, Jughead? He’s not…” She shakes her head; Jughead _is_ the press, after all.

“I’m not what?” Jughead asks.

“Going to tell anyone Betty’s skating recklessly.” Polly folds her arms over her chest and sticks one hip out, looking so much like their mother that Betty finds herself momentarily taken aback.

“Are you okay, Pol?” she asks, once they’re back in the locker room and out of Jughead’s earshot.

“Yes, of course,” Polly replies, a little too firmly.

For a brief, flickering moment, a follow-up question rests on the tip of Betty’s tongue. Then again, she reminds herself, someone they’ve known most of their lives _was_ murdered last night.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“Polly explained all the different kinds of jumps to you, I’m assuming?”

“She did,” Jughead says. They’re bumping along in a van going back to Sweetwater Skating Rink, alone save for the van’s driver. “I’m not sure how much I understood. Luckily, I’m not the one going on camera to talk about them with you.”

 _That’s too bad_ , Betty thinks, and then immediately wonders why that particular thought just ran through her mind, whether it’s because she’s more comfortable talking to Jughead than she will be talking to whomever the interviewer actually is, or whether it’s because… well… because he would look good on camera. She settles on the former just as Jughead clears his throat.

“Anyway, can I ask you something?” he says quietly, throwing a glance to the front seat as though he thinks the driver might be spying on them. “Did you hear anything around the Olympic Village last night? Anything about, you know...”

“Jason?” she says, and he nods. “Is this on or off the record, Juggie?”

“Off. Definitely off. Toni's refusing to okay a story about Jason for now. I just... I need to know.”

Betty nods. “Me too. But I haven’t heard anything yet. Actually, I was going to ask you if you heard anything from the press side.”

“Not really, but there hasn’t been of a chance to ask around.”

“If you do find something out,” Betty says quickly, “you’ll tell me, right?”

For a moment, Jughead remains silent. He merely studies her expression.

“Yeah,” he says, at long last. “Of course I will.”

“Partners, then?” She extends a hand, feeling a bit ridiculous, but excited nevertheless. “In crime-solving?”

“Partners in crime-solving,” Jughead echoes, and they shake on it.

But there are some things she won’t tell him, and one is that she feels the press of his hand on her palm long after she’s pulled her gloves back on.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Practice might have been moved to an alternate location, but there’s no way the Blossom rink could hold even a tenth of the spectators that Sweetwater can. And so, in preparation for competition, they return to the scene of the crime… in a manner of speaking.

The original kiss and cry has been completely enveloped in black drapes, thus hiding it from view, and a new kiss and cry has been hastily assembled. She and Jughead swing by the new one, observing it in silence under the watchful eye of several security guards, before moving to the little room that’s been set up to start filming the first video for her profile.

There, the on-camera talent is waiting for them, along with Toni and Fangs. “Josie McCoy,” she says coolly, extending a well-manicured hand. “I’m _such_ a fan.”

That vague sense of recognition she’d felt earlier clicks into place: a few years ago, on an exhibition tour, Betty was goaded into skating a routine set to Josie’s lone hit, a catchy Motown-lite number that had been played into the ground long before the tour organizers cleared the rights and foisted it on Betty.

“Thank you,” Betty replies, arming herself with her best camera-ready smile. “Oh, my gosh. It’s so great to meet you. I skated to ‘You’ve Come a Long Way Baby’ a while back, and…”

Josie’s smile gets a bit more genuine. “I know; I watched a video of you on the plane ride here. It’s so nice that we get to work together for real now, isn’t it?” She tosses an arm over Betty’s shoulder, like they’re suddenly buddies, and hums a few bars.

The tour had been miserable, from start to finish. They hadn’t even made it as far west as the Mississippi River before Betty had begun loathing the song, and to this day she can’t hear it without cringing. Luckily, the only person who sees her wince this time is Jughead.

(Josie must not have done any research beyond finding a video of one of Betty’s performances; if she had, she would now be bringing up the fact that this particular exhibition tour was the one on which Polly had damaged her knee beyond all repair.)

Betty settles back in her chair, simultaneously anxious to get this over with and anxious not to appear too anxious. Toni clips a microphone to her sweater, Fangs circles around with the camera, and Josie crosses her legs at the knee. There’s a monitor on the table, ready to go with a video of Betty’s short program at U.S. Championships.

“So walk us through what you’ll be doing tonight,” Josie says, all poise and perfect white teeth. “This is exactly what we can expect to see, correct?”

“Correct,” Betty confirms. “Well—I’ll be wearing a different costume, one that I think is a little more suited to my music. But the routine is the same.”

“Well, if the Olympics aren’t an excuse for a wardrobe upgrade, then what is?”

Josie laughs like they’re old friends, so Betty forces out a chuckle. The person who actually _is_ her old friend leans against the wall with his arms folded across his chest, seemingly fighting very hard not to roll his eyes; for some reason, this lightens Betty’s mood just a bit. There’s a familiar cast to his expression, something consistent from their childhood, and she decides Jughead’s continuing complete and utter disinterest in her lifetime of leotards with tiny, floaty skirts is profoundly comforting.

While she’s having that thought, Josie pitches forward a bit, as though expecting Betty to give her a witty reply. But before she can think of one, Josie asks another question.

“And speaking of upgrades, can you tell us about that triple axel you landed during practice this morning?”

 _Crap_ , Betty thinks. “What triple axel?”

“Don’t play coy, now,” Josie says, tilting her head knowingly in Betty’s direction. “A couple different outlets got footage. Are you planning on inserting that into your competition program tonight?”

“Definitely not.”

“Because it looked pretty good from where I was sitting.”

Where Josie had been sitting was in a room somewhere interviewing Alice, but Betty thinks it best not to point this out. “I was blowing off a little steam,” she says instead. “Every once in a while, I’ll throw one out in practice, just for fun. I can’t land them consistently enough for competition, though. And even if I thought I could, the Olympics aren’t the place to start trying.”

“Hmm,” says Josie. “All right, then. But just so you know…” By now she’s got her phone in hand, and is showing Betty something fairly horrifying—an eight-second video clip of that triple axel, taken on someone else's phone and now trending on Twitter. “You’ve made a lot of people very excited.”

“Let’s stick to talking about the routine I am actually skating,” Betty says firmly. “Shall we? I’m really excited about the music for this one. It’s a medley of scores from Alfred Hitchcock films…”

(As they get into a discussion of her opening choreography, Betty tries not to remember that Polly tore her knee beyond all repair attempting a triple axel.)

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Walking Josie McCoy through the routine she’s about to perform is one thing; stepping out on the ice to actually perform said routine is another entirely.

Betty is in the final group of ladies to skate tonight, so the wait has been a long one. When she finally goes out for warmups, it’s with her heart in her throat and her hands shaking. Her brain keeps helpfully regurgitating _It’s the Olympics_ over and over and over, like an alarm clock she can’t shut off. She’s managed to hit the snooze button a few times, silence her mind for maybe five minutes, but then _It’s the Olympics, it’s the Olympics, it’s the Olympics_ comes back, louder than ever.

She falls twice in warmup.

Polly, as her coach, is supposed to be right by the rink with bottles of water and reminders about not under-rotating her triple toe loop. Polly, as her sister, is supposed to be ready with words of encouragement, or at the very least, with the reminders (intended, in a backhanded way, to take the pressure off) that Betty has never been ranked higher than twentieth in the world, that she has never placed higher than sixth at a senior-level international competition, and that no one _really_ expects her to score much more than sixty points.

Polly, as the talented Cooper sister, is supposed to be skating tonight. Not Betty. But Polly is nowhere to be seen, and so Betty has no choice but to grit her teeth and take the ice alone.

Perhaps there’s a strange poetic justice in that.

A lot of people are more talented than Betty; she’s always known that. Other girls can jump higher, spin faster, skate more gracefully. But no one, _no one_ , is quite as stubborn as she is.

Or—no. Stubborn is her mother’s word. Betty prefers _determined_.

She skates to the middle of the ice, strikes her opening pose, and waits for her music to begin. The opening notes of the main theme from _Rear Window_ fill the air.

And just like that, just as she’d hoped would happen, a veil falls between her and the rest of the world. She’s aware of the audience, of the lights, of the judges.

But nothing matters except her breath and the ice beneath her skates.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Less than three minutes later, her Hitchcock medley ends and the veil lifts. First she feels her heart pounding wildly; then, gradually, she becomes conscious of her chest heaving with a familiar combination of exertion and emotion.

The comedown is routine. She waves in the direction she’s already facing, at the judges, then turns to smile at three hundred and sixty degrees of cheering spectators. She picks up the stuffed animal that’s landed closest to her, a surprisingly large and shaggy sheepdog, and hugs it to herself as she searches the crowd for her teammates. The ladies skated last in the event, and so all her teammates are there, waiting and cheering—Midge and Joaquin, Veronica and Sweet Pea, Kevin and, yes, even Cheryl Blossom. She doesn’t know their scores yet, doesn’t know where the U.S. stands in the race for the podium, and now that her duty is done, she can’t wait to find out. Just over in the next section, she sees her parents sitting with Fred Andrews and Archie and Jughead, all of them clapping and cheering too.

(Even through all the adrenaline, she wonders how Archie and Jughead's reunion went—whether Jughead even managed to interview him, or if Archie just spent the entire allotted time just trying to catch up.) 

Finally, Betty glides to the relocated kiss and cry, where Polly waits for her with blade guards, a bottle of water, and happy tears streaming down her face.

She’s never felt better.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

71.26.

“Oh, my god,” Betty whispers, burying her face into the stuffed sheepdog. It’s by far the best score she’s ever received.

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

She’s still shaking as she heads to the locker room. A reporter—not Jughead, not Josie, but the off-putting Dilton Doiley from this morning—asks her how she feels, and she babbles on for a few seconds until Polly grabs her elbow and gently drags her down the hall.

There’s no such thing as peace and quiet at an event like this, but eventually Polly finds a quiet corner of the locker room and sits her down.

“I’m so happy for you, Betty,” she says. “I am. You were amazing tonight. But I—”

“It should have been you.” Betty swallows, willing Polly to believe that despite her current elation, she would have done anything to switch places. “It’s so unfair that you never got the chance, Pol, and—”

Polly shakes her head, and takes Betty’s hands in hers. “No, it’s not. And you have to stop saying that, okay? Especially after that performance. But, Betty, I have to tell you. I have to tell _someone_ , and I couldn’t do it to you before you skated, but…”

She reaches up to wipe her cheeks, and Betty realizes that Polly’s tears are maybe only half happy ones.

“But?”

“Betty,” she says, laying a hand flat on her stomach. “Betty, I’m pregnant.”

“Oh.” The word comes out blankly; then the reality of what Polly said hits her. “Oh, my _god_. Polly, what—I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.”

“No one knew,” says Polly, her tears flowing freely again. “We were going to wait until after the Olympics were over. We were going to get married. Jason already put a down payment on a farm up near the border, we just…”

At this point Polly dissolves completely, leaving Betty in silence, save for the loud buzzing noise that’s suddenly filling her head.

“Jason?” She barely recognizes her own voice; it sounds hollow and distant in her ears. “You’re pregnant with Jason Blossom’s baby?”

Polly looks up at her. Even before she can nod, Betty knows the answer is yes.

She clutches the sheepdog a little more tightly, realizes she’s still wearing her floaty pink costume and ice skates, and feels suddenly and completely absurd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

“ _Pregnant?_ With Jason Blossom’s baby? _That_ Jason Blossom? _Dead_ Jason Blossom?” He hisses lowly, even though they’ve made sure they are quite alone.

Truthfully, he’s not entirely proud of where his imagination took him, when Betty strong-armed him into the supply closet of a locker room and the resulting space between them—or really, lack thereof.

But any thoughts of a romantic rendezvous dissipate into the stale, cold air of the closet, and Betty’s eyes are threatening to bulge out of her head as she nods furiously.

“I can barely believe it,” she says, almost to herself and with a bereft, exasperated kind of shrug. “I mean, I can’t believe she never told me they were even together, let alone—and I didn’t—oh my god, this is such a mess.”

She buries her face in her hands, groaning quietly, and hesitantly he reaches forward to push her hands back with his own. In the moment, he doesn’t quite realize he’s effectively cupping her face, so distracted by the watery look in her eye.

“Hey, hey,” he says softly, as soothing as he can. “Look, it’s a lot to take in. Just don’t beat yourself up for not reading her mind, okay? You couldn’t have changed what happened.”

“I know, I know, it’s just— She’s my _sister,_ Juggie, and this is personal now.” Betty sniffs, and he watches as her expression seems to steel over. “We need to know what happened. For her.”

“We will,” he swears, dimly aware of the fact that he shouldn’t make promises that he can’t keep. But the light catches her face in such a way when she raises her chin slightly in a defiant, reassured look, and he feels as though there is simply no other option than to keep to that word. It’s not just Jason that deserves justice now. It’s Polly, and, by association, Betty.

He drops his hand from her face once he recognizes the desire to rub his thumb across the soft path of her cheek, and her expression twitches then, as if they became aware of the loss at the same time. _You’re projecting,_ he tells himself, and steps back in order to cross his arms in what his sister teasingly labels as his thinking pose.

“Okay, if I’m going to get Toni and the crew on board, we need a pitch,” he says.

“AKA, we need a motive,” Betty surmises, nodding and running her tongue along her teeth. “Or suspects, ideally.”

Jughead rubs at his chin. “So, who would have the most to gain the most from Jason’s death? But especially at such a high profile event? I mean, there’s security everywhere, so why risk doing it here? More importantly, why now?” He asks it aloud, even though it's half-rhetorical. Betty bites at her lip, thinking. “And it’s just so _public_ a murder. Not to mention the fact that most people were partying or celebrating last night. Why would Jason be at the Olympic rink that late?”

“It wouldn’t have been to train, the Blossoms always use their own rink for that. And he would’ve never gone without Cheryl if he was there to skate.” Betty’s eyes widen. “I bet he was lured there. And if he was, it was probably by someone he knew.”

Jughead exchanges a significant look with Betty. And then, he slaps his forehead as something he should’ve recognized as extremely obvious catches up to him.

“Shit, I _completely_ forgot. Betty, yesterday Jason Blossom _emailed_ HuffPo requesting an interview.” She gasps, but the gears are whirring now and he stares at the wall, retracing his memory. “But the way the email was phrased—it was like it was a mass email, sent out to a bunch of journalists. In hindsight, it actually kind of sounded desperate to talk with someone. Any one of them could’ve been meeting up with him.”

Betty exhales slowly, smoothing down an already slicked back ponytail. “So…Jason’s killer was either someone he knew, or a member of the press?”

“Or someone pretending to be press,” Jughead counters, pacing as much as he can in the limited space of the supply closet. “And whatever he wanted to say to someone, whatever intel he had…is probably what got him killed.”

“Oh my god,” she says, falling gently back against a shelf. She meets his eyes, and he can’t name the expression there, but he feels it too. “Juggie, what the hell is going on?”

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄

Eventually, the air feels too thick in the supply closet, and they decide they aren’t going to get anywhere on suspects from inside it, so they head out together in search of Toni; he doesn’t want to get any further on this without her knowledge, because he genuinely suspects she might fire him for it. He shoots her a text before they leave the rink, but he wagers she is probably back at their hotel by now, so they head in that direction.

It’s only once they step into the frigid winter night that he realizes Betty is still wearing her skating dress; he tries to offer her his jacket, but she waves him off of the attempt, as if a sheer determination for justice is keeping her warm enough.

He supposes they make quite the pair crossing through the Olympic village, Betty in her shimmery pink skating dress and snow boots, and him in his five layers of flannel and Trucker jackets (always his own worst enemy, he’d refused to buy a better coat) but he then scolds himself for thinking of the two of them in any terms, benign or otherwise. A moment later, his phone lights up with a response from Toni, confirming she’s back at the hotel but that she doesn’t have time to talk about Jason yet.

He doesn’t care.

They walk faster.

“What are you going to say to her?” Betty asks as the elevator crawls up to their floor, but Jughead realizes doesn’t really have an answer to that.

“I don’t know, Betts. We’ll figure it out,” he mutters, even as the _ding_ of their arrival feels more ominous than it had before.

And, after a round of pounding on her door that feels uncomfortably familiar, Toni answers, but immediately throws up an arm against the doorframe, effectively blocking him from barging right in. The glare, however, drops right off her face as soon as she spots Betty behind him, sparkly pink dress and all.

Slowly, Toni steps aside, crossing her arms. “Alright. Consider me curious. What’s going on?” She asks dryly, eyes flicking between the two of them suspiciously.

“I need to write about Jason Blossom,” Jughead says, and Toni instantly lets out a puff of exasperated air. “Come on. _This_ is the story that needs telling, not some stupid will-they-or-won’t-they fluff piece!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Betty shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other, and Toni’s gaze grows more curious. And then she glances back at Jughead. “Look, Jones, I _said_ I agreed with you. Obviously we’re not going to sit on this forever. I’m just waiting for the all clear on whether or not they’re sending someone with more experience with reporting on crime.”

“No one else can tell this story like I can,” he blurts out, throwing his hand into the air. Toni’s eyebrows raise straight into her hairline. “I know how that sounds, but Toni, I have a source, and we already have leads, so this only works if it’s me.”

Toni blinks, and then stares back at Betty, her expression changing at once. “Let me guess. You’re the source?”

“Um, yes,” Betty replies, straightening slightly. “Sort of. I mean, yes. Yes, I am. And I want to work with Jughead on this. Those are…my conditions,” she adds, shooting Jughead a firm look, which he returns with a smile despite himself.

“Well, shit, that changes things,” Toni murmurs, hands on her hips. And then, as if it were so simple all along, she just shrugs. “Alright. I’ll run it up the pole and make sure you’re the lead on this.”

She sticks out her hand, and they shake on it.

Jughead glances at Betty, the makings of relief and something like pride swimming across her face. And for the first time since last night, Jughead feels a weight, however small, lift off his chest. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

(to be continued)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obsessive research department:  
> \- [Josie's hit single is very real.](https://youtu.be/v6b7tZglKGU?t=31s)  
> \- So is [Betty's costume](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JAprzQblZ1U/TyWldgsl6LI/AAAAAAAAfXo/C2cPm__Ubus/s1600/0551.jpg) (which is from _To Catch a Thief_ , not _Rear Window_ , but it was a better skating costume inspiration than any of the _Rear Window_ getups--because the authors are agreed that Betty's costume *would* be pink). Though, of course, Betty's version has a much shorter skirt.
> 
> Pretty please with a snowdrop on top, send us a review and let us know what you thought!! And/or, even better, let us know if you have any theories as to who killed Jason Blossom. It may not be who you think! Or maybe it is! ;)


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